Dalibor Farny is a fellow who got interested in Nixie tubes back in 2011, started playing around with them, learned how to make them, and turned his hobby into a thriving business. How very American of him — yet he lives in the Czech Republic (I think).
What is not so American, is that he’s not at all jealous of his processes. Mr. Farny isn’t a bit shy about showing you precisely how he makes these things so that anyone with a burning desire and sufficient gumption could duplicate his work. And quite a business it has turned into: his stats today claim that he has manufactured 7,064 of them to date, and his average 30-day income is almost $33,000.
A perfect example of building wealth from scratch, here is his fascinating video of the process:
It is interesting to note that these tubes are only possible because we have a base-10 numbering system. Any more digits and the number of elements would get unwieldy (they are already tightly packed, even with only 10). The Sumerians and Babylonians, both of which used the sexagesimal (base-60) system for counting, wouldn’t get much out of Nixie tubes, always presuming they lasted long enough to come up with electricity and digital electronics.
Of course, if you go the other way, it get easier. In binary (base-2) the lights only have to go on and off.
Thank you, RG, for inspiring me to recover this video from the mists of memory. The last time I watched it, he had only made about a hundred of them.
2 replies on “How to Make It: Nixie tubes”
Wow. That’s impressive.
When I first saw it, it blew me away. Even now, it seems like shockingly good work. And the fellow obviously has a decent education in science, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he had coded his own website.